The Sad Racist Specter of Richard Spencer

This guy isn’t raising his hand to ask a question. That’s a Seig Heil.

Apparently the Trump ascendancy has emboldened the likes of Richard Spencer to preach white supremacy so thinly veiled it’s a light glaze.

In a speech to an alt-right conference, Spencer let loose vitriol that substantiated everyone’s worst fears about Trump, his supporters, and the alt-right. The viral videos of his speech focus on the goons in the audience with arms raised in Nazi salutes while Spencer ended his speech: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory!”

There’s the obvious correlation between “Hail Trump” and “Heil Hitler”. It doesn’t get much more blatant than that. If one bothered to watch the whole speech – out of an intellectual duty to remain as objective as possible – it’s evident “our people” are not Americans, but merely white Americans, in which case the victory in question is a conquest over other races. Thus, while the audience members who tragically think a Nazi salute empowers them are the worst of the alt-right, their stupid gesture is justified by Spencer’s rhetoric.

There is a tendency among all people to view reality in black and white, good versus evil, and us versus them (in which “us” is “good” and “them” is “evil”). This ubiquitous mentality is the root of all racism, sexism, nationalism, and the various phobias, fears and hatreds of “other” people. Spencer falls into this trap and splats on the absolute bottom.

Spencer occasionally says very reasonable things, such as:

Why is something as simple as starting a family, owning a house, and leaving a legacy to your children seen as an almost impossible dream for so many Americans? Why must there be two incomes for a family simply to break even?”

This could have come from Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein. However, for Spencer, everything revolves around race. He might start off with something uplifting:

we should insist on our dreams – on the conquest of space, on the development of revolutionary technology, for a humanity that is greater than we are today

But then end it with racism.

for a race that travels forever on the upward path.

We know which upward-path-taking race he is talking about here, because he tells us again using the same terms later on in his lecture:

Whites do and other groups don’t… We build, we produce, we go upward.

He goes on:

Even liberals at some level know this, as they occasionally pay wistful tributes to the early 1960s America of the moon race and the middle class lifestyle, while conveniently forgetting that American society was 90% white at the time.

Even by his own definition, America was great in the 60’s because of the moon landing and burgeoning middle class. It is merely incidental that the majority of the population was white. But he gets worse, much worse.

America was, until this past generation, a White country, designed for ourselves and our posterity.

Whoa Nelly! America wasn’t a “white country”, it was a country that happened to be predominantly populated by white people. Aside from the worst social injustices against blacks, America was not designed for whites and white posterity alone, but for the posterity of all its citizens. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which was penned in 1870, gave blacks the right to vote. That’s 146 years ago, which is far more than a generation. While America has been slow to give its minorities full rights and equality, we pride ourselves on accomplishing that, and not on a mythical past where America is of, by, and for whites only.

It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.

This kind of rhetoric is even radical for the alt-right. If America belongs to anyone other than the people, and I sadly think it does, it’s the 1% who own it: the banks; fossil fuel industry; arms manufacturers; military industrial complex; pharmaceutical industry; student loan providers; billionaire class, and lobbyists… Some may argue that the people behind the institutions I mentioned are predominantly white. That’s true, but the vast majority of whites are in the 99%. All spotted dogs bark, but not all barking dogs are spotted. If that analogy isn’t painfully obvious: most the 1% in America are white, but most whites in America are not in the 1%.

It is different for us. Race is real … but in some sense, whiteness really is a social construct. Think of the concepts that are now designated “problematic” and associated with whiteness — power, strength, beauty, agency, accomplishment. Whites do and other groups don’t. In the banality of normal life and in our most outlandish dreams, in both our Narrative and theirs, to be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward.

Interestingly, both the far left and the far right insist that race is real, while much science begs to differ. Curiously, the left considers it hate speech to say there is only one race. According to the University of California, it’s a “micro-aggression” to say any of the following:

“There is only one race, the human race.”

“America is a melting pot.”

“I don’t believe in race.” …

I’m guessing the left is opposed to why these things are said, more than to the conclusion, though this ignores the positive effect of eradicating the belief in essential racial differences that Spencer subscribes to.

Spencer’s depiction of the “white race” is supremacist with a vengeance. According to him, whites are:

Powerful

beautiful

strivers

doers

crusaders

explorers

conquerors

Worse, he boldly asserts that non-whites are NOT doers, and we can guess he’s likely implying they aren’t any of those other implicitly desirable things, either.

Evidently, the Great Wall of China, which stretches over 13,000 miles and was started 7 centuries before Christ, was built by enterprising American whites in the last century, probably by Spencer’s own ancestors.

Crusaderand conquerorshould be red flags in that list. Not only is he saying the white race is superior, he’s idolizing the large scale conquest of other religions, races, and cultures.

There’s more in this unintended self-parody of deluded white supremacy:

We don’t exploit other groups. We don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around

I doubt there’s anyone who doesn’t see the obvious rejoinder to this. I can’t bear to belabor the obvious even more than I already have, so, I’m not going to type up the answer.

And that’s just the most obvious response.

As Europeans, we are, uniquely, at the center of history. We are, as Hegel recognized, the concept of world history.

Whew! Suddenly it occurs to me that the people in the audience could have been giving him the Nazi salute ironically, as criticism, but if they attended that conference, and weren’t booing, I guess they were standing in unison for the next 1,000 year Reich.

There’s something called Godwin’s Law, which is the alleged 100% probability that if an internet argument goes on long enough, one party will compare the other to Hitler.

I was annoyed with the easy comparisons of Trump to Hitler, however, when a speaker lauds whites as a unique, powerful, and beautiful race, at the center of world history, and applauds them for crusades and conquest, I might be tempted to Photoshop a certain Charlie Chaplin mustache on him, thus evading falling into the trap of Godwin’s Law (assuming you forgot about my 1,000 year Reich comment).

Yeah, that’s actually Charlie Chaplin’s mustache.

Think I’m going too far?

This is a unique burden for the white man, that our fate is entirely in our hands. And it is appropriate because within us, within the very blood in our veins as children of the sun lies the potential for greatness.

I thought the children of the sun were brown-skinned, but, this idea that there’s something in the blood of whites, even as a metaphor, that separates us from other “races” and makes us greater, is as ass-backwards as you can get. It would be awful and fallacious to assert that white culture was inherently great. The achievements of Western culture were largely due to people who happen to have been white, but not because they were white. The moon landing, for example, is an achievement of the accumulation of scientific knowledge and enterprise (not all of which is attributable to the West or whites) – of human ingenuity – and not of light epidermises. But Spencer mentions “blood”, in which case we aren’t even talking about culture, but DNA.

This is the epitome of racism: the belief that one race is inherently, biologically superior to all others.

We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to pollute the soil of this planet. We were meant to overcome–overcome all of it. Because that’s natural for us.

Because for us, as Europeans, it’s only normal again, when we are great again.

Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.

He couldn’t stop at elevating Caucasian DNA to the supreme, he had to go and belittle other races as “despicable creatures” whose mere presence “pollutes the soil”.

Seig heil, motherfucker.

People were raising their arms in Nazi salutes when they should have been raising their middle fingers.

When real white supremacy rears it’s ugly head (and that term gets thrown around as loosely as misogyny), average whites should denounce it.